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“We suck enough to make anyone a contender”

Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on Michele Bachmann is brilliant. And scary. And for those of us totally puzzled by the success of people like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, an explanation that makes some sense (to me):

“All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.”

Here are few more excerpts from the article:

“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.”

“Bachmann lies because she can’t help it, because it’s a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.”

“Imagine Joe McCarthy dragging Cabinet members into hearings and demanding that they publicly disavow the works of Groucho Marx, and you get a rough idea of the general style of Bachmannian politics.”

“There are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously.”

“Pawlenty reportedly views Bachmann’s decision to jump in and spoil his long-planned assault on the presidency as the equivalent to her having crouched over and peed in his Cheerios.”

Free ice cream to anyone who can name a popular, conservative, Republican, religious candidate who Taibbi *didn’t* think was “batshit crazy” or pandering to those who are. Corpsemen from all 57 of our states are cringing at the thought of a president saying and believing such stupid things as Bachmann.

Meanwhile, Taibbi’s article appears in a magazine whose founder and publisher believes we are decades away from tablet computers having a meaningful impact on the magazine industry. DECADES. This is an industry to which he has dedicated his life, and should presumably have at least a modicum of insight. This is intellect?

I don’t know a lot about Michelle Bachmann. I disagree with her on some things, and agree with her on others. But I do know that Matt Taibbi would almost surely think I am some combination of “batshit crazy,” entertainingly ignorant and deceitful, too.